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The AFS has received final approval from the National
Endowment for the Humanities of its proposal to undertake the second, 2015-2017
phase of the National Folklore Archives Initiative (NFAI).

The NFAI, supported by funding from the Humanities Collections and
Reference Resources program of the NEH's Division of Preservation and
Access, will over a period of years document and provide access to
information about folklore archival collections held by folklore programs at
academic institutions, community-based cultural and ethnic organizations, non-profit
organizations, and state government-based arts and cultural agencies in the
United States.

Folklore archival collections—unpublished multi-format
collections of materials created in the field that document traditional
cultural expressions and knowledge—comprise one of our nation’s most valuable
cultural resources, but scholars, public humanists,
teachers, students, and community members can access these materials only with
difficulty.

The purpose of the NFAI is
to make the intellectual content of folklore archival collections widely
accessible by addressing four major challenges:

1. These collections exist in a wide variety of
institutions, many of them not formal archives or libraries, and thus there has
been no systematic national accounting of the universe of folklore archival
repositories. This universe needs
to be surveyed, in part so that its least-well-known members can be initially
described as a first step toward making their collections accessible.

2. In order to make these
collections accessible, the repositories that hold them must use shared cataloging
templates designed for the needs of multi-format folklore archival collections.

3. Repository- and collection-level information about
the broadest range of these resources needs to be incorporated into a national
union catalog to make them accessible to scholars, educators, and members of
the public.

4. Individual institutions in the field of folklore studies do
not by themselves have the means to build and maintain a national
infrastructure to coordinate this work.

The NFAI project includes five interrelated
activities (all overseen by project directors Steve Green of the Western
Folklife Center, Andy Kolovos of the Vermont Folklife Center, and Tim Lloyd of
AFS, and carried out by library and archival specialists from around the
country):

2. Database development: We have developed an online database that incorporates the cataloging template and descriptive
structure just mentioned. We and our archival partners are populating this database with data from the survey and test cataloging
activities (#s 3-4) described below.
Ultimately, we will re-package the database to become the initial
version of an open-access, Web-based resource of information about folklore archival
repositories and collections across the US.

3. Survey: We have completed a national outreach
effort to gather data about the folklore archival collections, many of them "hidden,”
of a universe of several hundred folklore programs at academic institutions,
community-based cultural and ethnic organizations, non-profit organizations,
and state government-based cultural agencies across the US as a first step
toward improving their preservation, discoverability, and access, and
ultimately enabling their use and study through participation with the NFAI.

4. Test cataloging: We are providing modest financial
support to 25 folklore archival repositories across the country (including
those at academic institutions, non-profit organizations, and state government
agencies) to catalog, at the collection level, a selection of their folklore
archival collections, using our database and under our guidance.

5. Sustainability planning: We are developing an
organizational infrastructure to manage, govern, support, and sustain the NFAI for the long term, as we expand the
reach of its database, engage and train more repositories in cataloging,
and explore options for new collaborations.